


A Separate Peace

by road_rhythm



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Body Horror, Hallucination Lucifer (Supernatural) | Hallucifer, Hell Trauma, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:54:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22391353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/road_rhythm/pseuds/road_rhythm
Summary: The Devil wants to have a dialogue. Sam's just trying to buy a fucking soda. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Lucifer/Sam Winchester
Comments: 28
Kudos: 144





	A Separate Peace

Sam is six.

Like all young children, he has nightmares and, lying in the dark, experiences the most powerful emotions of fear he will ever know in his life. Everyone goes through this, so no one, not Sam, not Daddy, not even Dean, suspects that there is anything abnormal in the quality or intensity of his dreams.

Mostly, there isn't.

One night in early summer, though, Sammy has a dream that is both more vivid and less specific than is typical for children his age. It's just a bit of comet vapor trailing off the end of a long, black spell of dreamless sleep and only lasts a few seconds. There's a light. It's soft, even as it hovers just above Sam's face, but he can feel it making his skin prickle, like it's giving him cancer the way the science show said happens, like something's growing and spreading under his skin. The light moves closer, and a face leans out of it. Sam couldn't say how he knows it's a face; it doesn't even look like one, except that it is.

The face kisses him softly on the lips. Sam feels something that he doesn't even know he doesn't understand. It's like the feeling is older than he is. The face pulls back. Sam looks into it. There are eyes, and what's looking out of them is the social but inhuman intelligence of birds.

He forgets all about it in the morning.

* * *

The Devil wants to have a dialogue. Sam is just trying to buy a fucking soda.

"In Heaven, the souls that are most wrapped up in each other get to bed down in the same bivy sack. You already know that."

Sam feeds a bill in. The machine spits it back out.

"And why is it only those select few who get to share a popcorn bucket? Because it's in Heaven that you find out what's really dearest to you, in Heaven that your soul has made a record of what you really think represents the good life, like, with a capital-G, Platonic kind of Good. Finding out what somebody else's Heaven is made of? Now, that's revealing." Lucifer's voice softens. "Dean rejected yours."

Sam flinches, but he doesn't look around. He flattens the bill and tries again. The machine takes the bill, thinks about it a minute, and spits it back out again.

"It's _money,"_ Sam snarls at it. "Can't you even recognize when somebody's trying to give you money?"

"Don't worry," Lucifer soothes him, "he'd get over it. I mean, spend enough time up there together, and you'll eventually learn to let the old squabbles go; sooner or later he'll think, 'Hey, the old Samster wants to spend eternity with me, I guess I can live with it if he wants a room of his own, too.' And with your friend Ash up there to give you backstage passes to humanity's greatest hits, hey. You could have a whale of an everlasting."

Frustrated, Sam crams the bill back into his wallet. It's the crispest one he has, and this piece of shit keeps turning its nose up at it. Fine, then.

"Snuggled up against each other, the Winchester pups back in the same basket. Rewinding the good stuff over and over. I mean, the highlights, anyway. Doesn't really matter if it's objectively great, since Heaven doesn't work that way."

Sam jams the floppiest, mankiest bill in his possession into the slot, the one with a corner missing and a blue dick in felt-tip pen. The machine swallows it down with a happy chirp. Sam stares and barely reins in the urge to kick the thing on principle.

Instead he presses the button for Diet Coke. The machine informs him his selection is not available. He tries regular Coke; out of that, too. Sam hits the change return, hears a shower of metal as it churns out quarters in place of his five, and pounds his forehead into the _Ice Cold!!!_ promise glowing on its front.

Lucifer's voice comes from directly behind his ear. "It's the greatest intimacy Heaven has to offer."

Sam scoops out fistfuls of quarters and storms off with pockets weighed down with metal and no soda.

Abruptly Lucifer wheels and plants himself directly in Sam's path. They lock eyes. "The greatest intimacy _Heaven_ has to offer," the Devil says deliberately.

Sam freezes for a moment. He closes his eyes and presses the hard edge of a quarter into the scar tissue on his palm.

When he opens his eyes again, Lucifer is gone. Sam steps carefully around the place where he stood and continues on.

* * *

Sam pries the flask out of Dean's grip, sets it on the night stand, and guides Dean's fingers under his pillow and around the hilt of the knife there. Dean sighs and settles deeper into sleep.

Slowly, Sam perches on the edge of the other bed, watching, intent. Looking. He sees: Dean. Dean's breathing, Dean's grayish skin, Dean's full clothing that needs to be washed. Dean's flask on the table next to the phone book. The flask has been watered down lately, and the parade of bottles slightly slower, as if Dean is trying to cut back. A promise to Bobby, probably.

Sam leans forward for a better look. Dean smells. But he's a vessel, too, a true vessel in a way Adam isn't and Sam is. Sam tilts his head. He thinks he can just make out the ley lines on the inside of his brother, the structure that makes him suitable for what he's suitable for. Or maybe they aren't there, at all; maybe they only come into being when an Intended says Yes, in the one instant of will that is the last, that crystallizes all possible branches of choice forever—or is meant to.

Still, Sam looks for them for a long time.

* * *

Dean is next to him, rolling their hips together. They're naked. It's good, probably.

Dean looks worried. Or focused, at any rate. Like he's really determined to get Sam off, but is finding it an uphill battle. It isn't that Sam isn't in the game, here; his dick is rigid where Dean's fisting them together, and he can feel the bliss that sparks and the safety of Dean's arm slung heavy around his waist, but the string connecting his body to his mind has a lot of slack in it right now. Not much can communicate along it.

Dean catches Sam's chin between thumb and forefinger. Sam goes in for the kiss, tangling their tongues together. It's warm.

"Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying you're cute together," says Lucifer.

Sam slides an arm up Dean's spine, palm flat between Dean's shoulder blades, and eats the near-whimper Dean gives up out of his mouth. He slings his leg over Dean's hip and hauls Dean's body tighter into his, his body tighter into Dean's. It grinds their cocks together. It puts another few inches between Sam's back and the spot where the Devil sits.

Gasping, Dean breaks the kiss. He's working his fist so fast on them he must be giving himself carpal tunnel. "C'mon, Sammy, c'mon, _c'mon_. Give it to me. Let me see it."

"Yeah, Sam." Lucifer's voice is inches from his ear, although the words displace no air. "Let me see it."

* * *

"Well, I don't go to church on Sunday," Lucifer sings, "don't get on my knees to pray."

Sam is not on his knees, either. He's flat on his back.

"Don't memorize the books of the Bible; got my own _special_ way…." Lucifer hitches the scalpel up and in on the emphasized word. "I know Jesus loves me," he croons, "maybe just a little bit more."

The point of the scalpel turns in a small circle, excising a little cone out of the roof of Sam's diaphragm. There's a sensation of a lot of liquid dropping down.

"Oh, I fall down on my knees every Sunday"—The scalpel is gone from Sam's abdomen; Lucifer genuflects beside the bed.—"at Zerelda Lee's candy store."

The Devil presses his face in close to Sam's neck, but Sam cannot turn his head to look at him. Immobile, he can only see the ceiling. 

The bedspread is slick polyester. The ceiling is pink popcorn. The bubble on Sam's lips bursts, spattering blood into his eyebrows.

Lucifer hooks the scalpel back into the puncture he made before, almost delicately, and begins to slit up through the peritoneum. He goes slowly. "When the weather gets rough and it's whiskey in the shade," he murmurs, "it's best to wrap your Savior up in cellophane."

Something rasps over the bedspread. The sound is a quiet sibilant that doesn't fit in the context of the room, and Sam strains at the edges of his peripheral vision to be able to see what's making it.

The snake is coming over the floral quilting between his legs in long, smooth pulses. Contract, extend, contract, extend. It reaches his groin and climbs up and over the denim without pause.

Lucifer pets his head. "He flows like the Big Muddy, but that's okay…."

Sam cannot so much as twitch at the cool scales hitting his skin.

"Pour Him over ice cream for a nice parfait."

The snake's body lies heavy over Sam's cock and balls as it nudges its snout into the incision in his abdomen. It moves the same way when it pushes its way inside: contract, extend. Contract, extend.

"See, only a chocolate Jesus…" The tail vanishes into the slit. "…can satisfy my soul."

The snake is smooth pulses of scales around Sam's heart.

* * *

"Have another, Sammy."

A Dixie cup of amber. Sam drinks it down.

There's a featureless desert of time before: "One more for both of us, huh? Okay, here we go, nightcap for our nightcap."

A Dixie cup of amber. Sam drinks it down.

The corners of the room are vibrating slightly; past his toes at the end of the mattress, darkness curls like smoke. It's really hard to make his eyes focus.

"All right, Sam, what's going on?"

Sam looks up and after some effort finds his brother's face. It's drawn, waxy with the pallor of the veteran alcoholic, with the lips clamped in a line. By the time Sam processes all this, he's long since lost track of the words. "Huh?"

"There has never been a time I couldn't drink you under the table, so why exactly aren't you unconscious yet?"

Huh. Okay. Dean is trying to get Sam to drink himself to sleep. That makes sense. "Dunno. Trouble sleeping."

"Is he—?"

Exploded across the room, shards of impossible geometries embedded in the wallpaper and the TV and the clock, tweeting like birds, singing like broken spheres, squeaking like glass on glass? "Right behind you? Yeah," Sam groans, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.

"I thought you licked that," says Dean. ("I thought you licked that," mimics the lampshade.) "You crashed in that town outside Frank's place. Didn't you?"

Dean's face is a bit whiter. It's almost the same color as his knuckles on the neck of the bottle.

Did Sam crash or didn't he? ("Didn't you?" parrots the air conditioner.) "I'm tired," Sam says.

Dean sets the bottle down on the nightstand; it takes him two tries. "What can I do?"

And because Sam is very drunk, he says, "Lock me down. Please?"

For a moment, Dean just stares at him. In other circumstances, it would probably make Sam want to disappear into the floor, but he's barely afloat in this conversation as it is. Then Dean turns and crosses to the bags.

He comes back with flashing metal, something that twists and flares bright in the lamp. He kneels down in the trench between the beds and fumbles for Sam's arm. Sam feels Dean's breath wash over his cheek, his fingers shucking Sam's flannel up his arm, and then the cuff clicks around Sam's wrist, cold and secure.

"Tighter," Sam says. He doesn't know when he started to hyperventilate.

Once again Dean stares at him, freckles stark on his cheeks. Sam can't parse the feeling in his eyes when he locks the free end of the cuffs around the bolted-down leg of the bed frame and holds Sam's wrist between both palms. His hands are so warm against the metal.

"Please," says Sam.

Dean squeezes the cuff not until it bites into Sam's skin, but until it is flush and unmoving against it. There he stops. The second the cuff is touching his wrist all the way around, the tension drains out of Sam's body, and he finally exhales.

"Thank you," he mumbles. "Thank you."

"He quiet now?" Dean asks.

Sam listens. "Yes." The word leaves his mouth on a sigh.

Dean's still kneeling there. His head is bowed, but the line of his shoulders is taut. Sam would ask what's the matter, but he's already falling down, down, down.

* * *

"Don't you ever think about what it could be like if we were all down there together, the way we're meant to be?"

Sam, teeth chattering, wraps his arms around himself to make up for how inadequate the hospital scrubs are. "I don't know what you mean."

"Sure you do. You've thought it yourself. You _are_ thinking it yourself, so you know as well as I do that Adam was an interloper. Go on, Sam. Let yourself wonder how different it could be."

"Nothing would be different," Sam whispers to the wall. "It wouldn't be better with Dean there, it would be worse, because you'd still be _you,_ and you'd just use him to torture me, he'd just be a button for you to push, like I'm just a game for you to play, I'm an Atari you play and play and play because you're locked in a room with nothing else so of course you play it but you hate the thing, you'd hate the thing even if it hadn't trapped you there because you'd still be trapped there with it, and it wasn't even fun to beat it the first time but you're locked in a room with nothing else so you play and you play and you play."

Lucifer's hand is suddenly bracketing Sam's jaw. His eyes bore into Sam's when he forces Sam to look at him; they aren't Nick's. "No one's playing games."

He doesn't release Sam's jaw. His face is inches away; his face is far above, a cathedral roof of lightning. "Sammy, Sam-I-Am, Samael. I love you. You know I love you. It's why you're continuing my work on you, even though we're apart."

His lips on Sam's temple feel curiously like electric shocks. "Not too much longer now."

* * *

In the Cage, Sam screamed things. For as long as he could, he made himself scream _for_ someone; there was a reason why, but Lucifer threw it away. The string Sam tied onto himself to measure how far gone he was sounded like _dean_ and then _daddy daddy please_ and then _dean_ again. Then it snapped. After that, there was just a scream, formless and eternal.

All of this happened in an instant. Or maybe it took forever and is still going on and has been going on forever and was happening before he even got there. At Stanford, ages ago, in a series of instants of time that was maybe just the Cage in disguise, Sam wrote a paper for a physics class about irreversible processes and the increase of entropy as the thing that makes time time. There is no entropy in the Cage.

Perfect, adj.: from the Latin _perfectus,_ perfect passive participle of _perficere,_ to finish.

_Divine Power made me_  
_Consummate Wisdom_  
_and Primal Love._

Sam got the paper slung back to him with a curt note that this was Physics 202, not Metaphysics 101, and forty-eight hours to revise or fail. He revised.

The Devil says, "You're real. I'm very real. Everything in between is what we call set dressing," and Sam's understanding of time as a series of instants collapses into one instant that is everything.

It's perfect.

**Author's Note:**

> Hallucifer sings [Chocolate Jesus](https://youtu.be/m5kHx1itU8c) by Tom Waits.


End file.
